Inventors and Remarkable People

December 8, 2006 Glass is a jewel-like substance made sand and transformed by fire. Its origins are as distant as the discovery of the wheel, and within a short time, we learned to colour it. Stained glass windows came along 1700 years ago when Constantine first permitted Christians to worship openly in 313 A.D., and came to prominence a millennium ago when substantial church building began in France, Germany and England. The earliest surviving example of pictorial stained glass is from the tenth century Lorsch Abbey in Germany. Now this mediaeval art form is being recreated in the 21st Century, using the latest in digital technology. "In the Womb of the Rose" is a unique, digitally created stained glass window, produced by worldwide collaborators via the internet. Traditionally, stained glass windows, or ‘rose’ windows, featured in medieval churches, telling stories from the Bible using recognisable iconography and symbolism, using the skills of many glass artists to create the final monumental artwork.
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November 17, 2006 We regularly note significant historical milestones and today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of a significant technological achiever. Soichiro Honda, the founder of the Honda Motor Company was born this day, November 17, 1906. The son of a blacksmith and a weaver, Soichiro was fascinated by machines and how they worked. One of his earliest memories was being enthralled by the first motor car he had ever seen. He later said: “As the car rolled through our small village I turned and chased after that car for all I was worth.” The young Soichiro may not have been able to catch the car, but it signalled the chasing of his dream: to build his own cars and motorcycles and win world championships with them. Without formal education, Honda forged an empire encompassing road cars, All-Terrain Vehicles, engines, generators, outboard motors, personal watercraft, water pumps, scooters, snowblowers, robots and more recently jet aircraft.
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October 20, 2006 A team led by scientists at Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering has demonstrated the first working "invisibility cloak." Now before you get all excited about the prospects of playing the invisible man or Harry Potter, it’s not a Dr Zhivago sort of cloak but an electromagnetic radiation cloaking device and we’re many years from being able to turn an object or person invisible to the naked eye. The cloak deflects microwave beams so they flow around a "hidden" object inside with little distortion, making it appear almost as if nothing were there at all. Cloaks that render objects essentially invisible to microwaves could have a variety of wireless communications or radar applications, according to the researchers. Watch the video.
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September 21, 2006 It’s time to pay homage to super sleuth Dick Tracy who turns 75 next week, or more specifically, it’s 75 years since Dick first appeared in the Detroit Mirror in 1931. The creation of cartoonist, indeed futurist, Chester Gould, Detective Tracy used forensics, futuristic methodology and wireless technology way ahead of its time. Gould’s imagination gave us the Closed Circuit TV Police villains line-up in 1953 - real suspect lineups were introduced the following year. Dick was using Electronic Telephone Number Pickup in 1954, 28 years before Caller ID was patented. One we’ve still to see was the Magnetic Space Coupe which took Tracy to the moon in 1962, seven years before the first actual moon landing, with the prospects of the magnetic car still realistic, having been used in the Lexus Concept from "Minority Report". The most iconic of Dick Tracy’s kit though, was his wrist communicator, a device that started countless millions of technological dreams in a young American technology community which went on to create ubiquitous wireless communication. There would not have been one leader in the communications revolution who wasn’t touched by Dick Tracy’s videoconferencing wrist watch. The device arrived in 1946 with two-way audio, became video in 1964, and a wireless wrist-worn computer in 1987. Gould’s imagination deserves credit for helping to fuel the communications boom of the late 20th Century.
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September 18, 2006 In May of this year, Elma G. "Pem" Farnsworth passed away and we were staggered to think that someone who witnessed and played such a major role in one of the key inventions of the 20th century could have still been alive. Pem was the wife of television inventor Philo T. Farnsworth, one of the last “lone inventors” who worked it all out from scratch and his quest to finally transmit pictures through the air was reached for the first time on September 7, 1927. Now Farnsworth’s story is to be told in a new stage production "The Farnsworth Invention" written by well known writer Aaron Sorkin, the creator of the television series “West Wing” which won him an Emmy for outstanding writing in a drama series for his fast-paced and intricate dialog. Sorkin’s play “A Few Good Men” also became a major film. Originally written as a screenplay, and now rewritten as a play, "The Farnsworth Invention" will run from February 20 to March 25, 2007 at the La Jolla Playhouse Potiker Theatre in California. One of the backers of the production is none other than Steven Spielberg so don’t be surprised to see it as a feature film sooner or later.
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September 5, 2006 The term “renaissance man” implies an extraordinary breadth of expertise and capability and no person epitomises the well-rounded concept than painter, inventor, sculptor, architect, anatomist, engineer, geometer and musician Leonardo da Vinci. That he was a master of several of these disciplines and hundreds of years ahead of his time in some makes him without equal. All of which makes this announcement incredibly exciting as there’s now a compelling new way to engage with Leonardo’s remarkable work, at least in the area of invention. Innovative Italian media company Leonardo3 has created a digital version of the Codex Atlanticus – an interactive book containing more than 100 of Da Vinci’s most fascinating manuscript pages. The pages can be “turned” and it’s possible to zoom in on Leonardo’s sketches, and the inventor’s secret messages and notes, many of which can’t be deciphered with the naked eye. For example, zooming in on Leonardo’s design for a military fortress shows his secret plan for a subterranean tunnel that allowed for escape if the fortress walls were breached. Enigmatic notes and sketches can also be discovered by “flipping” the pages over and looking at them from the back. More than 50 3-D machine models spring from the images on the pages as well, allowing the viewer to interact with the machines and understand how the designs work. Guests can view Leonardo’s design for a naval cannon from all sides and actually fire this artillery, seeing how its opposing cannons were designed to absorb the force of firing and keep the boat on course. Ideal as a gift for the gifted and special people in your life, the price is as remarkable as the contents – you can buy it on-line for just UER25.90 (US$33).Read More

Steorn, an Irish company, claims to have produced a groundbreaking (we do not use this word lightly) technology which is based on the interaction of magnetic fields and produces free, clean and constant energy. If the claims are true, the new technology will enable a significant range of benefits, from the convenience of never having to refuel your car or recharge your mobile phone, to a genuine solution to the need for zero emission energy production. It will also provide a secure supply of energy, since the components of the technology are readily available. Steorn’s technology appears to violate the ‘Principle of the Conservation of Energy’, (energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only change form) considered by many to be the most fundamental principle in our current understanding of the universe. Fully aware that its claims will be considered bunkum by anyone who has graduated kindergarten, Steorn today issued a challenge to the global scientific community to test its free energy technology. Steorn has placed an advertisement in The Economist to attract the attention of the world’s leading scientists working in the field of experimental physics. From all the scientists who accept the challenge, twelve will be invited to take part in a rigorous testing exercise to prove that Steorn’s technology creates free energy. The results will be published worldwide. That's Steorn's Richard Walshe with the George Bernard Shaw quote on the placard - all great truths begin as blasphemies.
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August 8, 2006 Georgia Tech researchers have found a way to shrink all the sensing power of sophisticated biosensors — such as sensors that can detect trace amounts of a chemical in a water supply or a substance in your blood — onto a single microchip. In compact communication, signal processing and sensing optics technologies, multiple wavelengths of light are combined as a space-saving measure as they carry information. The wavelengths must then be separated again when they reach their destinations. Wavelengths used for these sophisticated applications have very high spectral resolution, meaning the distance between wavelengths is very small. The device that sorts out these crowded wavelengths is called a wavelength-demultiplexer (WD).
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July 26, 2006 The Hulme Supercar proudly takes the name of the former World F1 Champion, international racing driver and one of New Zealand’s favourite sons, Denny Hulme. In doing so it also takes the name of Hulme’s equally famous father, Clive Hulme. Denny Hulme won eight F1 Grands Prix, two Can-Am titles, and the World Formula One Drivers Championship in 1967. His father Clive achieved war hero status during World War II for his exploits as a sniper-killer operating just behind enemy lines and his Rambo-esque, one-man forays behind enemy lines saw him kill 33 snipers before he was seriously wounded - he remains a living legend to the folks at home. For his “outstanding and inspiring qualities of leadership, initiative, skill, endurance and most conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty,” Clive was awarded the highest medal of military valour, the Victoria Cross. The parallels between father and son make interesting reading.
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July 6, 2006 If you’re at all interested in science fiction memorabilia, the upcoming Hollywood Memorabilia auction on eBay might well be worth a look. First up, the star of the show is indeed not scifi but a genuine Buzz Aldrin Gemini XII / Apollo XI flight suit with original rank insignia and mission patches, which was worn during training for both missions by the second person to walk on the moon. It’s the only flight suit of Aldrin’s in private hands and is expected to fetch between US$120,000 and US$150,000. The movie memorabilia which will also go during the auction is quite breathtaking in its breadth and depth, and includes a complete T.I.E fighter pilot outfit from Star Wars, Liam Neeson’s Light Saber from Star Wars - The Phantom Menace, the Proton Pack used by Bill Murray in GhostBusters II, an array of guns, bugs and clothing from StarShip Troopers, and dozens of futuristic gadgets and outfits used in Star Trek. Plus Arnie’s leather jacket from Terminator III and a futurist police helmet from The Fifth Element and … follow the links.
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